What if SHU Turned Postmodern

1
What if SHU Turned Postmodern?

• Andrew Tatusko
• Organization and Governance
• November 21, 2004

2
Sorting Out the Assumptions

• Seton Hall is not currently postmodern.
• Postmodern theories challenge the basic
  foundations of modernity.
• Postmodern theories challenge fundamental aspects
  of the current organizational structure of Seton
  Hall.
• What follows is both exploratory and a thought
  experiment.

3
Three Areas that Postmodernism Challenges
Community
Autonomy
Merit
4
Community in General

• The university seeks to form a community formed
  around intellectual pursuits.
• The university forms a student community and a
  student culture.
• The university has general principles or
  ideologies that hold the structures unity
  together.
• The organizational saga and the cultural
  dimension of the organization hold these notions
  together.

5
Community _at_ SHUIn General

• Our mission is to prepare students to be servant
  leaders who will make a difference in the world,
  and our entire community embraces this
  commitment.
• As John Henry Newman argued, the true
  University, a Catholic university in which
  theology is a branch of knowledge, offers deeper,
  broader teaching in the disciplines other than
  theology, through a sense of the unity of
  knowledge, of history, of religion and of the
  moral life.

6
Community _at_ SHUIn particular

• Catholicity
• What are SHU's core values and how can these
  values carry out SHU's mission and embrace our
  diversity?
• How can SHU infuse its justice and faith
  commitments into learning and campus life?
• Curriculum
• What should SHU change to better communicate the
  benefits of a values-based, liberal arts
  education?
• The Core Curriculum Committee was elected by the
  Faculty Senate in November 2001, in response to
  President Sheerans request that the faculty
  develop a core curriculum which would embody a
  signature Seton Hall University experience.

7
How Firm a Foundation ?

• Seton Hall represents
• A Foundational System

8
Four Crumbling Foundations of Modernity

• Self Sufficiency
• Reason
• Progress
• Optimism

9
Do the Evolution
10
Challenge to Community _at_ SHU

• Richard Rorty language conditions how knowledge
  and ideas are passed down and communicated.
• Different communities inhabit different language
  galaxies
• There are different communities that have
  different galaxies of meaning and language games
  that condition knowledge
• Truth becomes a negotiated meaning rather than
  an objective concept

11
Language Galaxy or Language Game
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Challenge to Community _at_ SHU

• Jean Francois Lyotard Metanarratives are
  suspect
• A metanarrative is a foundational ideology or
  structure that legitimates knowledge.
• Kurt Gödels Incompleteness Theorem
• An incommensurability between disciplines in a
  heightened fragmentation of knowledge
• Not unlike Kerrs multiversity

13
Challenge to Community _at_ SHU

• Michel Foucault- power/knowledge
• Knowledge and power are inextricably related and
  condition each other.
• Other discourses or possible discourses are
  suppressed in favor of those who have enough
  power and influence to sustain them.
• Disciplinary separation of discourses is less
  associated with the pursuit of truth and more
  associated with bureaucratic arguments that offer
  the most convincing reasons for a given discourse
  to have legitimation.

14
The Postmodern Community _at_ SHU?

• Catholicity is one discourse among many that has
  no suitable foundation that can determine if it
  is true because
• It is just another narrative one foundation
  among numerous possibilities.

15
The Postmodern Community _at_ SHU?

• A key to most postmodern theory is an emphasis on
  difference which means
• All voices have an equivalence in their
  statements of what is true. Pluralism and
  multiplicity trump unity and a sense of a core.

16
Predictability Does the Flap of a Butterfly's
Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?''

• The Creative/Pragmatic Side of the Challenge
• Since all foundations are fundamentally suspect,
  there is room to reform and recreate.
• All assumptions are laid bare leaving the mandate
  to reconstruct and renegotiate boundaries.
• Dialogue once considered taboo or
  counter-constructive can now be viewed as
  necessary to the creative process.
• Difference must be included in the whole.

17
Language Galaxy or Language Game
18
Language Game to Interdisciplinarity
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So for a PostmodernistWhat would this look like?
20
Sources Cited

• Clark, B. (1972). The organizational saga in
  higher education, Administrative Science
  Quarterly. (17)2.
• Kerr, C. (2001). The Uses of the University. 5th
  Edition. Cambridge, MA Harvard University.
• Kuh, G. D. and Whitt, E. J. (1988). The
  invisible tapestry Culture in American colleges
  and universities, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education
  Report No. 1. Washington, DC Association for the
  Study of Higher Education.
• Lyotard, J-F. (1993). The Postmodern Condition A
  Report on Knowledge. 9th Edition.
• Mourad, R. P. (1997). Postmodern Philosophical
  Critique and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Higher
  Education. Westport, CT Bergin Garvey.
• Seton Hall Statement on Catholicity.
  http//president.shu.edu/shucatholic.htmlidentity
  
• Seton Hall History. http//www.shu.edu/history.htm
  l
• Seton Hall Sesquicentennial Plan.
  http//events.shu.edu/strategic/
• Seton Hall Core Curriculum Draft Report.
  http//myweb.shu.edu/courses/1/ZZ_Role_AllEmployee
  s/content/_460359_1/Core_Committee_Report_10.1.04.
  pdf
• Tatusko, A. (2005). The tacit media pedagogy as
  praxial critique A critique of postmodern theory
  for higher education. Teachers College Record,
  107(1), 114-136.